Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

Realism

By far the hottest word of 2006: the noun realism, with its brother noun, realist, as a label for its practitioners.

In a Washington Post column titled “This Is Realism?” Charles Krauthammer led with “Now that the ‘realists’ have ridden into town gleefully consigning the Bush doctrine to the ash heap of history, everyone has discovered the notion of interests, as if it were some new idea thought up by James Baker and the Iraq Study Group.”

Contrariwise, Tom Ricks wrote in the same paper: “The Iraq Study Group report might well be titled ‘The Realist Manifesto,’ ” a repudiation of the Bush administration’s diplomatic and military approach now being challenged by recommendations stemming from “the ‘realist’ school of foreign policy.”

“We are all realists now.” That was the lede of George Packer’s article in a recent issue of The New Yorker, paraphrasing Milton Friedman’s temporary salute to the economic activism of Britain’s Lord Keynes. “Iraq has turned conservatives and liberals alike,” Packer wrote, “into cold-eyed believers in a foreign policy that narrowly calculates national interest without much concern for what goes on inside other countries.”

Then, unexpectedly in a magazine with unabashed Bush-bashing credentials, Packer put his thumb in the eye of triumphalist realists: “At some point events will remind Americans that currently discredited concepts such as humanitarian intervention and nation-building have a lot to do with national security — that they originated as necessary evils to prevent greater evils. But, for now, Kissingerism is king.”

That equated realism with Kissingerism, synonymy that Henry the K surely considers insufficiently nuanced. He was long associated, however, with the German word Realpolitik (pronounced re-AL-po-li-teek), coined in 1853 by Ludwig von Rochau in an attack on German liberals. In an essay in Time last month headlined “The Return of the Realists,” Walter

Isaacson noted that “the doctrine of realism, or its Prussian-accented cousin Realpolitik, emphasizes a hard-nosed focus on clearly defined national interests, such as economic or security goals, pursued with a pragmatic calculation of commitments and resources. Idealism, on the other hand, emphasized moral values and ideals, such as spreading democracy.”

Pragmatism was the word that proponents of realism preferred in the Nixon administration to define the opening to Communist China and détente with the Soviet Union, as well as a tolerance for authoritarian (O.K., dictatorial) leaders like Lee Kwan Yew of Singapore who were on our side in the cold war. In that temporary renaming of realism, Nixon speech writers liked to quote the famous saying attributed to President Franklin D. Roosevelt about a Central American strongman: “Somoza may be a sonofabitch, but he’s our sonofabitch.”

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

(Tangent: That “famous saying” first appeared in Time magazine in an unsigned article — as all were in the era of group journalism — about a 1939 visit to Washington by President Anastasio Somoza García. “To prime President Roosevelt for the visit,” Time reported in 1948, “Sumner Welles sent him a long, solemn memorandum about Somoza and Nicaragua. According to a story told around Washington, Roosevelt read the memo right through, wisecracked, ‘As a Nicaraguan might say, he’s a sonofabitch, but he’s ours.’ ” No source for that “story” was ever found; it must be put down as apocryphal, a word rooted in the Greek “hidden.” This debunking denies today’s realists one of their best lines.)

The old realism of the 1960s and ’70s derogated diplomatic morality, coined “the balance of terror” and glorified strategic stability. It treated idealism as a fatuous word, deriding President Woodrow Wilson’s dream of a war to end wars that would “make the world safe for democracy” as hopelessly unpragmatic. In the 1980s, however, under Ronald Reagan, it was the word realism’s turn to take a hit: the lexical pendulum swung toward evocation of America as “the city on a hill,” an embrace of human-rights rhetoric and the moral denunciation of an “evil empire.” Crusading idealism was In and amoral realism was Out.

In the first Bush era of 1989-93, with “stability” the paramount goal of diplomacy, the word realism began to make a comeback. It peaked in the senior Bush’s visit to Kiev, just as the Soviet Union showed signs of coming apart in the Baltics and Ukrainians sought their freedom from Moscow rule. Brent Scowcroft, a retired general who had been a longtime Kissinger aide, helped write a stability-first speech for George H. W. Bush urging Ukrainians to stay within the Soviet Union and direly warning of “suicidal nationalism.” This caused a vituperative right-wing opinion monger at The New York Times to label the outburst of realism “Chicken Kiev” (and the elder Bush has not talked to me since).

Realism, as word and policy, had its ups and down through the Clinton years, but in the first term of Bush II was battered by what the historian Robert Kagan calls “Americans’ belief in the possibility of global transformation — the ‘messianic’ impulse.” As public impatience grew with “the long, hard slog” in Iraq, however, the stock of Wilsonian idealism fell out of bed, and realism came back into oratorical vogue and, in last month’s elections, into shared political power.

Ascendant realists now face the problem introduced in The New Yorker: even amid war-weariness, how to justify a label with a history of unprincipled dickering with dictators and an amoral priority of stability over the export of freedom?

Language has a solution: an adjectival qualifier. Although Krauthammer two years ago pre-empted democratic realism to describe his idealistic policy of selective intervention, real old realists are now turning to ethical realism, an oxymoron with broad appeal, while liberal internationalists are trying out progressive realism. Meanwhile, grim idealists will soon be running the modifiers prudent and practical past focus groups. Prediction for 2007: Whatever adjectives are chosen to take the edge off the core position, the other side will denounce the label as unrealistic.